Sebastien Loeb put his Rally Australia crash down to a simple lapse in concentration, explaining that he had been distracted by reading a split time on his Citroen's dashboard.
The reigning champion rolled several times on SS4 this morning, just after he had taken the lead from his teammate Sebastien Ogier.
"I saw the split time on the dash. I just saw it," Loeb said. "Sometimes I see the split times and sometimes I don't. Usually I wait for Daniel [Elena, co-driver] to tell me. Daniel was telling me a [pace] note and I was waiting until he had finished the note to tell him: 'It's OK, I have seen the split.'
"I don't know why, but I wanted to tell him I had seen it and he didn't have to tell me. Just at this time, when I told him, I was a little bit not concentrating. It was at the entry to the corner, I was a bit too fast. I hit the bank at the exit and we rolled."
Loeb admitted that it was an unusual incident, but said it was not dissimilar to his last significant mistake on the 2009 Acropolis Rally.
"I remember the crash in Greece was because I was correcting a note and this one was because I was telling Daniel something. It's because of not concentrating," he conceded.
Ogier took the lead after Loeb's crash but had an accident of his own this afternoon. With both works Citroens out, Ford now runs one-two with Mikko Hirvonen and Jari-Matti Latvala.